“the top result was a Google Store link to buy Google’s own Pixel 7, with the rest of the top results being various Android phones sold on Amazon.”
That was the query “cellular phone,” lifted straight from the PageRank paper in which Brin and Page warned that ad-funded search is not aligned with good results. Luu ran naive queries with the ad blocker off. Google scored no better than Bad on any of them, and ChatGPT returned zero scams. The founders described the failure mode in writing and then built it anyway.